The dwellings of hundreds of African ethnic groups offer a variety of conceptions and building practices that contradict the widespread image of the primitive hut commonly attributed to rural Africa. Each house or group of houses is designed not only to shelter the members of a family, but also to enable intimate communication with ancestors and divinities and to harmonize with the forces of nature. Such an architecture thrives in a community context where it is simply not acceptable to plunder resources from the earth, and resources are used only in accordance with their availability, in quantity, and at times of year that minimize environmental impact. This cultural dimension and its realization through different architectural practices are illustrated in this work with examples taken from dwellings across numerous ethnic groups in sub-Saharan West Africa. Drawings, plans, axonometric projections, and photographs show the beauty and complexity of this architecture that is a spiritual praxis -- as much place of life as work of art.

The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short humouristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human's desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all things and beings of our planet are intimately related, alive and ultimately "One." While each colourful painting alludes to our close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to the industrial world, where dream and reality often appear intertwined. Through the shifting identities of forms, this album gives us a glance at our own formless nature and how our excessive wish for love, home, comfort, power, and productivity inexorably transforms our worldview and make us bypass our deep infinite nature, which cannot be contained through words. As some indigenous traditions have taught us: "life is like a dream. One wonders whether it is by living that we dream or by dreaming that we live."

This body of work is a contemplation of human beings' passage on earth and their intimate interrelation with the environment. This book attempts to bring humour to the things we are getting attached to. It points at the invisible within the visible, the immaterial within the material or the vertical nature of being (and its mirror-like quality) within our horizontal way of living (where our mind, time, and space condition our experiences). The naked body is seen as our primary indivisible unit of perception which is usually pushed and pulled by our thinking mind's desire to either get less or more. In other words, our lives are coloured by our minds and since body-mind is a single entity, most of the colours painted on the body are an allusion to the range of our changing desires from being invisible or transparent to wanting to be singular and the centre of attention. The book's Interviews (the interviewers are from Russia, Colombia, Korea, Germany, and the US) stanzas, and photographs are not seen as being subservient to one another but can be seen as an assemblage of three independent directions that may or may not intersect following each reader.